Firefox and thunderbird hardware acceleration

Ask Fedora
1

I’ve been struggling today with crashing firefox and thunderbird with bus errors. Yesterday, all was well, last night there was a power cut so I restarted the machine in the morning, noticing these failures. Experimentation by starting them with -safe-mode showed that they worked ok with hardware acceleration turned off (but it has been turned on on this machine for years!). And I’ve just noticed that mpv/smplayer won’t play m4a/mp3 files (fails with exit code 7). Running an up-to-date Fedora 43 on an old Dell Precision T1650.

I’m sure I’m missing something really obvious, but some pointers would be really appreciated!

Many thanks

Des

PS Just found that firefox occasionally still crashes, even with hardware acceleration off. And mpv (rather than smplayer) issues the potentially helpful message:

[vo/gpu/libplacebo] Found no suitable device, giving up.
[vo/gpu/libplacebo] Failed initializing vulkan device

2

When you see the bus error what do you see at the end of sudo dmesg?

When I see that sort of issue I have two thoughts is the .so that is names in dmesg when you get the bus error damaged on disk?

Is there an issue with memory? In which case I would run memtest overnight to check my RAM.

3

Thank you so much. I’ve just started looking at it again, and you are exactly right - it looks as though there are some damaged files (alas, caused by a disc that is slowly collapsing!). It looks as though several power dips through the night were just too much for the disc…

Sorry - I should have checked dmesg earlier.

Thanks again.